


wanna be adored

by verity



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Banshee Lydia Martin, Future Fic, Glitter, Hipster Derek, Los Angeles, Multi, Polyamory, Sirens, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-24
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2018-01-16 20:38:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1360960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verity/pseuds/verity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It took Lydia a moment—she was still caught up in Euclidean spaces and paradoxical decomposition, tongue sweet with bourbon—before she caught Derek's meaning, registered the rabbit flutter of Stiles's heart beneath her open palm where she'd pressed it against his chest. Stiles squeezed his eyes shut, like he couldn't bear to look at her, already steeled for the inevitability of her rejection. Lydia glanced at Derek, eyes glittering beneath lowered lashes. "Are you sure?" she said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wanna be adored

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blue_rocket_frost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_rocket_frost/gifts), [whiskey_in_tea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskey_in_tea/gifts).



> Ashe and Scout and I had a massive email thread about the CRUCIAL AND FORMATIVE INFLUENCE OF FRANCESCA LIA BLOCK in our literary and young adult lives. This fic resulted.
> 
> Thanks to Chai for the last-minute, super speedy beta! You're a hero!
> 
> content notes: some references to deaths that Lydia is aware of because banshee powers.

When Lydia arrives in Los Angeles, the air is so hot it shimmers above the asphalt of the highway spilling down from the dry scrub of mountains into the city. The city skyline comes into view as cars begin to clog the lanes, silhouette framed by palm trees and backed by vivid blue sky, perfect as a postcard. Drivers jostle for position, pass Lydia, pass each other, their horns punctuating the drowsy rhythm of stop-and-go traffic.

Lydia's thighs are sticking to her leather-upholstered seat; she stopped for gas in Santa Clarita, but her ass is already starting to feel numb again. She turns up the air conditioning, turns down the radio, checks her reflection in the rearview mirror. Gauzy sundress, ombre shades, carefully-styled hair that's survived the ten hour drive with minimal damage—she spent days planning this outfit, months preparing for her migration south. In her mind, it was always as dramatic as her daily passage through the doors of Beacon Hills High School, when boys and girls alike turned to look at her as if she exerted a gravitational force.

Here, now, she's just another girl in a 2010 Volkswagen Beetle with California plates stuck in rush hour traffic. Lydia may be a genius, a beauty, and a banshee, but everyone comes to L.A. to be a star.

—

Lydia's a junior at Caltech now, and tonight she’s at a party in Laurel Canyon. The house is rambling, eccentrically furnished in a way that speaks of careful cultivation rather than the dumpster-diving of Lydia's classmates, and Lydia wanders from room to room, dazed by the sweet fog of pot smoke. There are coolers and coolers of beer dripping dew onto the kitchen floor—Lydia accepts an unopened bottle—and an androgynous person in a slinky gown mixing drinks in a room papered floor-to-ceiling with silent film posters. Lydia sits on an empty chair next to the bar and drinks her beer in silence as she watches the stream of people pass her by. She doesn't recognize anyone she knows, see the person who invited her here. But that's not exactly a surprise.

Two girls are making out in one of the hammocks on the lanai when Lydia steps through the open French doors. Lydia tries not to stare at them, their lips shiny with lipstick and spit, soft bodies curving together. She checks her phone again. Her last message from Stiles is still the one she received last night, just the house number and the time.

A boy ducks his head through the door, smiles at Lydia when she meets his eyes. “Anthemusa are on in five,” he says. “You coming?”

—

Stiles is at UCLA. He spent his first two years on campus in Westwood, but now that he's living with Derek in their house in Hollywood Hills, Lydia sees him more regularly. Sometimes, she brings him home with her for the night, even though her cramped studio apartment is a far cry from the comfortable warmth of Derek and Stiles's home. Lydia lines his eyes and takes him out to dance, brings him home to ride in her bed, smearing sweat and glitter on purple sheets, returns him to Derek marked and marked up.

Derek doesn’t seem to mind.

—

Lydia doesn't snap to consciousness at the side of dead bodies anymore, but she finds them nonetheless. Even high up in her ivory tower, people die. Aging professors, students tumbling from fraternity windows, wide-eyed kids with pills in their hands and nothing on their minds. Lydia dreams their slumber, their suicides, and gets out of bed without bothering to write them down. She can't save everyone.

The girl Lydia’s come here to see sways on the makeshift stage, flanked by two angular girls on keyboard and drums. The room quiets when she taps her microphone, once, twice; she tips back her head and lets loose a throaty, wordless howl. The glass in the windows trembles, and not from the force of the amplifiers at her feet. Lydia feels the vibration pass through her like a cleansing fire.

Beside Lydia, a slim-hipped boy falls to his knees, braces himself with his palms flat against his thighs, face still and reverent. One by one, all of them slip under the siren's thrall; her sequined dress and exaggerated makeup shift in the shadowed room to ritual garb, turn her to a goddess who hungers for their submission. Lydia's throat tightens as a woman near her begins to weep. The room is hazy with smoke and hot with the press of bodies, but the yearning that twists inside Lydia is green and wild.

—

Derek doesn't talk about what happened in Beacon Hills, why he left, how they found him again working in a record shop in Echo Park. Stiles was just starting his record collection, buying at random from the $1 bins—"Mom had this one," he said, holding up a copy of _Tusk_ ; Lydia sighed, said, "Check it for scratches."—and they didn't recognize Derek at first. He was slimmer, wearing chunky horn-rimmed glasses for show, his hair shaggy around his ear.

"Nice shirt," Stiles said as he passed over his stack of Fleetwood Mac and Journey. "New Pornographers?"

Derek gave a short, aborted nod, and Lydia saw it, that familiar stiffness in his shoulders, his straight, sorrowful spine. "Oh, honey," she said, moved despite herself.

Since then, Derek's bought the store and turned it into a music venue that more than covers the rent. He already had the house, a bungalow high up in the hills with painstakingly refinished floors, walls slick with low-VOC paint, and granite counters, like a featured post on some agonizingly hip design blog from five years ago. Stiles took charge of the garden.

"This is unnecessarily twee," Lydia says from her seat on the front steps of the house. She and Derek are sipping mint juleps from heavy tumblers while Stiles teeters on a ladder, hanging lanterns and crystal strands from old chandeliers in the magnolia trees, prisms flashing between leaves and tentative white blossoms. "Please tell me there’s some ritual significance."

Stiles shrugs and leans forward to hang another lantern.

—

Lydia draws, paints; she was never a singer, and now she doesn't sing in the shower, not even along with the radio when she's alone in her car. There's too much power inside her, and she's not interested in dealing with what comes when she calls. It's always ugly. It always hurts.

Nothing like this, this rapt audience bent and bowed in supplication. The siren onstage looks at them knowingly, loving, her gaze fixed on each person in turn. When she gets to Lydia, their eyes meet; there’s a tidal pull on the knot at Lydia’s core. Lydia opens her mouth, inhales, stops herself before she sings back, sings along.

There’s no romance in being a wailing woman; no Odysseus will ever lash himself to the mast just to hear to Lydia scream. She clenches her hands into fists and digs sharp nails into her palms. Forces herself to breathe.

—

The first time Lydia had sex with Stiles, it was on the big rug in front of the fireplace in Derek's living room. The only light came from the candles scattered around the room, big ones on the mantle and tea lights in the cold hearth. They'd all been drinking, though not that much, and Lydia had been curled in Stiles's lap on the couch for the last half-hour, walking him through the math proof she'd been working on. "You're not paying attention," she said after the third time Stiles glanced at Derek, quiet and patient at the other end of the couch, sipping his mistletoe-laced gin. "If you want to fuck, I can go home."

"You don't have to," Derek said.

It took Lydia a moment—she was still caught up in Euclidean spaces and paradoxical decomposition, tongue sweet with bourbon—before she caught Derek's meaning, registered the rabbit flutter of Stiles's heart beneath her open palm where she'd pressed it against his chest. Stiles squeezed his eyes shut, like he couldn't bear to look at her, already steeled for the inevitability of her rejection. Lydia glanced at Derek, eyes glittering beneath lowered lashes. "Are you sure?" she said.

—

Lydia doesn't bother to text Stiles when she leaves, just gets in her car and drives. She knows the winding route through the hills by heart, the tracery on the land like veins, her intent propelling her forward like a pulse.

He’s sitting on the front steps, waiting for her. “So you did go,” he says as she steps out of the car. “How was the show?”

“Spellbinding,” Lydia says sharply, locking her car behind her. “What was the point of all of that?”

Stiles shrugs. “Agla’s done a few shows at the shop. She seems to be dealing well with her—you know.”

“Karaoke is not going to solve my problems,” Lydia says, hooking her finger in the back of his collar as she steps up onto the porch.

Derek opens the door for them, barefoot and shirtless, hair mussed. “You’re here late.” He doesn’t sound bothered, putting his hands around Lydia’s waist and pulling her in, burying his face in her hair. Stiles crowds up behind her, nuzzles the nape of her neck. He slides his palm up her thigh, voice low as he murmurs in her ear, “What do you want?”

When Lydia came to Los Angeles, she wanted to start her life over, but not like a phoenix with a messy, ashy rebirth. She didn’t anticipate what she was giving up: the audience, the adoring throng. The spotlight. Everything that’s stayed with her is in this room—her boys, her voice, her merciless calling.

Lydia closes her eyes and says, “Worship me.”

—

She undresses as she walks back toward Derek and Stiles’s bedroom, steps out of her panties in the foyer, pulls her dress over her head in the den, unhooks her bra on the threshold. Derek is already pulling back the sheets on the bed like he’s getting ready to tuck them in; he’s such a weirdo. Stiles scoops Lydia up from behind, deposits her on the half-unmade bed before she can do more than kick her heels. “Don’t be an asshole,” she says, prodding him in the chest with the sharp heel of her pumps.

Stiles grabs her heel, hoists it higher to press a kiss to her ankle. “That’s how you like me.”

Derek sighs and crawls over the bed to yank Stiles on top of the covers. “Come on,” he says. “You heard what she said.”

“Mmm, right,” Stiles says, rolling onto his back so he can shuck off his jeans and boxers.

Derek takes Lydia’s shoes off and continues where Stiles left off, placing a trail of teasing kisses up her calves and then the sensitive skin of her inner thighs. “Don’t stop there,” she whines when Derek pauses to trade places with Stiles. By all rights, Derek’s the one who should have supernatural skills in bed, but Stiles is the only person who’s ever been able to get Lydia off just with his mouth. He laves her clit with the flat of his tongue, steady and unremitting until she tips over into orgasm, shuddering against his tongue. Then Derek is beside her, pulling her towards him while Stiles slides up the bed. They stroke her arms, her hair; Stiles kisses her slow and easy while Derek caresses her breasts, his mouth hot on her throat, beneath her ear. His dick is hard, flush against her ass. “This good?” he says, nuzzling her jaw.

Lydia nods, pushes back against him. “I want you in me,” she says when Stiles leans over her to press his lips to Derek’s. “Your turn.”

They do it just like that, Derek taking her from behind with Stiles’s hand cupping her clit. Derek fucks in long, smooth strokes, never quite pulling out all the way so she’s never so empty. He’s so big, and he feels so _good_ —Lydia screws up her face, lets out a low, hard grunt, and fists her hand around Stiles’s dick. This is exactly what she wanted: her boys surrounding her, enveloping her. Knowing her.

“I’ve got you,” Stiles says, dragging the nub of his thumb over her clit, and Lydia comes again, just like that.

—

In the morning, Derek makes waffles and Stiles makes coffee. Lydia eats breakfast in bed. Then she showers, pulls on one of Stiles’s shirts, and spends the morning on the hammock in the backyard, doing her reading for class. The air is hot and dry, sweet with the scent of magnolias and jacaranda. When she goes in at noon, Stiles eats her out again, back against the door and his shirt pushed up to her waist. She’s overheated, sweat pooling between her shoulder blades, Stiles’s broad hands bracing her trembling thighs.

“Feeling worshiped yet?” Derek says, stepping into the hallway.

Lydia cups Stiles’s cheek and says, “Yes.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [ladyofthelog](http://ladyofthelog.tumblr.com) on tumblr.


End file.
